This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

At a perfect, never-before-seen 20-0, the Golden State Warriors come to Toronto with their heads held high, chests fully puffed, their confidence maxed out.

This is life when you’re making history with every win, piling on to the NBA’s best-ever start to a season and routinely dominating your opponents night after night. Twenty wins in, the Warriors’ numbers are overpowering. They’re winning by an average of 15 points per game. Stephen Curry has taken his MVP game to another level, toying with defenders and averaging a league-best 32 points per game.

The Warriors depth and teamwork on both ends of the floor are good enough that said MVP is often not needed in the fourth quarter, which only lends to making the team that much more lethal the next night.

Beyond prayer, the Raptors know they’ll have to come with a near-perfect game if they want to be the team to spoil the Warriors’ flawless start. That might be hard to come by, given the Raptors’ ups and downs of late. They’ve split their last 10 games, unable to find the consistency that coach Dwane Casey is trying to pull out of them.

Article Continued Below

Still, Raptors forward Patrick Patterson thinks he and his teammates will be ready to get back on track come tipoff.

“For some reason we seem to play a lot tougher when we play teams like this,” Patterson said, after scoring just three points in Thursday’s disappointing loss to a Denver Nuggets team that had lost its previous eight games.

“Honestly it’s better when a team like (Golden State) is coming in because for some reason guys seem to step up their game and rise to the occasion and play to the level of competition.

“But when we seem to play teams that are termed not as good, we play to their level of competition.”

The Raptors have a bad habit of laying an egg, as Casey called it on Thursday, against a lesser opponent, particularly if the Raptors are coming off of a big win. It’s something that a good playoff team, like Golden State, rarely does.

“That’s what bothers me. Everyone’s talking about Golden State when we had (the Nuggets) this team with their backs against the wall,” Casey said Thursday night, the loss still a fresh sting for him.

“You’ve got a wounded animal coming into your house and you didn’t respond, the same with Phoenix the other night. They came in wounded and outworked us in our own house and that’s embarrassing.

“Golden State’s a great team, great players, but again, what are we going to do? Let them come into our own house and attack us on our home court? We’ll see what we’re made out of and we’ll go from there.”

The inconsistency is breeding a frustration with the Raptors. It’s a team that wants to continue its evolution and at least make it to the second-round of the playoffs this year, but games like the one against Denver and like the loss to Phoenix this past week, keep tugging at the ankles, tripping it up before it can get where it wants to go.

After scoring a game-high 34 points, Raptors shooting guard DeMar DeRozan was told Thursday night that his team was 5-5 against teams that were .500 or less this season.

“We tighten up that 5-5 and make that 8-2 and it’s a whole different thing,” he said. “I’d rather have these issues now and turn it around and be rolling at the right time.”

Every team’s goal is to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Warriors at this point in the season. DeRozan would love to be a part of the team that put that first blemish on the Warriors’ record, maybe to shift those prying why-didn’t-you-win questions to another team for a night.

“To be honest I’m just getting tired of . . . it’s a hell of a record but we’ve to treat it like another game that we’ve got to win,” he said. “We know we can go out there and play with that team. We just have to go out there and do what we need to do and do it from the start and not wait.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com